Lauren Sato, CEO of Ada Developers Academy.
Over the past several months, big tech has been dominating the headlines with sweeping layoffs that have tech talent reeling. On top of macroeconomic forces, the industry is “right-sizing” after an overinvestment in digital products during the pandemic. For companies that have struggled to compete for technical talent, this is a welcome change of the winds. There are now thousands of seasoned software engineers in the job market—plenty to pick from for the first time in years. But when we look more closely, is there much of a “choice”—a diversity of options?
No—and here’s why. Throughout tech’s big boom over the past decade, the predominant strategy for diversifying our technical teams has been through talent acquisition: bringing gender and racial minorities into white, male-dominated teams. Through this strategy, we achieved 28% representation for women and 5% for Black and Latina women, which is actually impressive given that our university systems’ output for computer science graduates is just 18% women and less than 10% women of color. With talent acquisition coming to a grinding halt and the market becoming flooded with experienced, largely white-male talent, it is becoming difficult to see an immediate future in which gender and racial representation in tech doesn’t move backwards.
The AI Magnifier
When this moment makes it into our history books, however, it is likely that this tech contraction will merely be a section in a chapter titled “The AI Revolution.” There are massive cultural implications being debated every day as large language models (LLMs) become more mainstream, more robust, faster and smarter, seemingly overnight.
For our purposes here, though, the primary issue at hand is the implications of these changes on the field of software development. Tools such as GitHub’s Copilot now allow developers to dramatically increase their productivity and output and, when layered with bugfix applications, create instances where individual developers are able to do the job that used to require several people, or even take their hands fully off the wheel.
So, we have a workforce whose diversity is frozen in time—and more likely to become less representative, given the recent flood of talent—that we are now enabling with tools that will magnify their impact, further reducing the need for new talent.
Why does this matter? Does it matter? I believe this moment is a pivotal one, with major implications for our collective future:
• What happens to the relevance of our tech products when they are increasingly developed by fewer, hyper-enabled people who are not representative of those products’ consumer base (70% to 80% of consumer decisions are made by women vs. a 28% female software development workforce)?
• How significant does the AI alignment problem become when those who are closest to it all share the same blind spots because they share similar lived experience sets?
• What happens to the wealth gap, and thus our economic instability, in this country when the financial benefit of the tech industry is further concentrated with a small, privileged group of people?
Making A Choice
If our industry had a good therapist now, they would say, “Let’s focus on where we have choice.” Here is where I believe we as a tech ecosystem have a choice to make: Given these dramatic shifts in our industry, we can choose to continue on our current path and build a technical future that has massive blind spots, exacerbating social and economic inequities with a rate of change that is unprecedented and potentially irreversible.
Or, we can choose to invest deeply in solving this problem now by collaboratively building pathways into AI-enabled software development that work for gender and racial minorities.
If we choose the latter, we have a lot of work to do—and quickly. I believe the first step is for business leaders to incorporate more ways of future-proofing their talent. One part of doing this involves bringing new talent in from diverse pipelines. Make an active effort during your hiring process to seek out skilled individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds.
Another part is future-proofing your current talent. If you already have a diverse workforce, give them opportunities to acquire these AI-enabled skills, such as how to use and bugfix autocomplete and prompt engineering tools. Leaders need to support the creation of educational pathways that help women and minorities adapt to meet the changing industry needs. Showing your support and the demand for these efforts can also encourage much-needed public and private investors to help facilitate these transitions.
We actually have a chance here to give women, gender-expansive and BIPOC people equal footing for once if we build a powerful ecosystem that both solves current problems and creates resilience for the future. The field of technological development is changing rapidly, and we have the ability to ensure this change is for the better; but we have to work together to ensure that the future of tech strengthens our communities instead of widening our disparities.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here